I gave a talk on the PushButton Engine at the Flash Gaming Summit a few weeks ago, titled “PushButton Engine 101.” It is available online, thanks to Adobe’s kind support in sponsoring FGS and recording the sessions. You can view the PushButton Engine 101 talk here. It’s about 40 minutes long. People seemed to like it!

If you have comments/questions/feedback, I highly recommend visiting the PushButton Engine forums thread about it.

The Flash Gaming Summit was a blast. I got to spend time with the guys from 8bit Rocket, with Dan Cook, and, of course, the crews from Adobe and Mochi. For the second conference, Adam Saltsman eluded me, but I had a great conversation with Nicolas Cannasse about building companies. Lunch was spent with the PBE crew in attendance – JD Conley, Dion Whitehead, and a couple of others. I had a million other awesome conversations, too, which is why I love going to conferences.

Other than the very early start, I thought FGS went a lot better than last year. (Perhaps because they had me on the advisory board – conference organizers take note! ) They had a solid tech track in addition to their business track. Maybe next year it can be two days – or just start a little later.

It is pretty cool stuff, and I’m excited to be sharing it! You get introduced to the PushButton Engine, get a preview copy of Clint Herron’s excellent Platformer Starter Kit, and (assuming things go smoothly), you end up building this platformer:

We’re excited about it.

If you are a Flash game dev and at MAX or in the LA area, I’d love to talk games with you. Shoot me an e-mail (ben dot garney at gmail dot com) or DM me at @bengarney and let’s make it happen!

Also, with luck, Monday there should be a cool update on that secret project I was working on.

See you at MAX!

We’ve been trying different approaches for the documentation for PushButton Engine. We have reference docs, API docs, and tutorials. There are comments at the class, function, and body levels. There are example applications of varying size and complexity. There’s still a lot more to document, but what is covered seems to be making sense to people.

Lately, I’ve been doing short – 5 or 10 minute – Keynote presentations, recording them, exporting them with the iPod video export option, and putting them up on YouTube. They’re a nice workout for presentation skills; I spend an hour or so building a slide deck, then run through it a few times before recording and uploading. They also seem to be a good way to explain high-level concepts about PBE.

I’ve done them on Resources in PBE, on the PBE profiler, on why components are a smart idea, and how your UI and PBE related. Nearly 500 views across the four of them in the last month, which I think is pretty good for what is dry technical content at best.

Speaking of presentations, I will be talking about Developing in the Cloud at Austin GDC this Friday, 4pm. Talking to game developers, I have noticed there is not a lot of awareness of how cloud computing can help cut budgets, shorten development time, and increase features. We’ve been using cloud resources heavily at PushButton Labs, so the talk will cover the risks, rewards, and tradeoffs related to things like EC2, S3, Google’s services, SVN hosting and so forth in terms of letting you focus on your game. I’ll also talk about how you can directly integrate things like Google Spreadsheet and Analytics directly into your game, and why it is a good idea to do so.

I’ll be at Austin GDC Wed-Fri. If you want to meet up and talk cloud computing, Flash game dev, or PBE, shoot me an e-mail, tweet, or comment and let’s make it happen!

I gave two talks at Austin GDC last week. The slides for both are available now. Check them out!

• Robust Efficient Networking How to make great networking for your game. Also interesting for people working with Torque’s networking (as I discuss a very similar architecture). This was a lot of fun to research and give. I had a friend do the art. People seemed to really dig it.
• Unlocking Flash To Build The Next Great MMO Is it possible to build a great MMO in Flash? Learn about the possibilities and the technical issues involved. I gave this one with Rafhael Cedeno of Multiverse.

As always, feel free to e-mail me with any questions or comments! You can reach me at .

The promised follow up page is ready to go. You can get my slides and find some links to useful Tamarin resources. Enjoy!